Bucket List

You asked me once

if there was a list of things

I wanted to accomplish before

I died.

My list is so long.

I want to wander it all:

Arashiyama, Giant’s Causeway,

the glowworm caves of Waitomo.

Even the old coal mines

of Bibb County, Alabama,

even the cracked streets

of backwater towns no one

visits anymore but coyotes

and weeds.

I want to explore all the secrets

this world tucks into her rocky deserts,

into her wild grasslands, into the valleys

and caverns slung beneath her blue sea belly

like stretchmarks three days after

a new mother gives birth.

I want to write a thousand books

about all the beauty I’ve discovered,

about all the raw ugly beauty of us,

and buy with them a place

among my idols,

and if I can’t,

I want to subvert them:

to scrawl 10,000 poems

like graffiti into the walls of buildings

on every continent on this planet,

even goddamn Antarctica.

I want to hack the airwaves

and interrupt these

regularly scheduled programs,

to interject poem

after wild guerilla poem

between the nightly pundits

and the shitty sitcoms

and the car insurance commercials.

I want to experience weightlessness,

to slip the chains of orbit

and see the world the way asteroids do,

to fling my poems down from satellites

and watch them burn up like cinders

in the atmosphere or crash into cities

leaving craters so smoking and wide

they can never be forgotten.

I want schoolchildren to know my name;

I don’t give a damn if it’s for greatness

or for infamy.

All these grandiose things

are never going to happen.

But truth is, I don’t need

any of them to be content:

Let me hold your hand every night

for the rest of my life, even if

my fingers grow arthritic and gnarled.

Let me kiss you every morning

for the rest of my life,

even if, in my old age,

I forget the sound of your name.

Let me write for you

one little poem every day:

a haiku, a cherita, a rhyming couplet,

if that’s the only thing I can muster out.

I just want a poem for you

as the last words

to breathe past my lips.

That’s all I need.

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